The Night Villa (15 page)

“Pretty convenient,” I say. “Do you think Calatoria made up the prophecy to make Phineas feel as though he had been fated to come to the villa?”

John turns away from the view to look at me. His dark sunglasses hide his oddly colored eyes, but I can see by the little lines around his eyes that he’s narrowed them. “That’s an interesting idea. Why do you think she’d want Phineas to think he was fated to come to the Villa della Notte?”

I have to think a moment. I’d thought at first that Phineas was the one who was trying to create the appearance that he was fated to come to the villa—Phineas who had staged his shipwreck so he could gain access to the villa’s library and secret rites—but something about what I had read last night had made me think that Calatoria had her own plans for Phineas.

“It’s what she said about the rites requiring stamina and the way she let her lamp light up the sexiest parts of the painting. She needed a male participant for her mystery rites…
and
it’s the way she brought up the books Phineas had with him at the same time. Like she was offering him some kind of trade: the rare books he was carrying for a night of debauchery.”

Lyros nods. “That’s an interesting theory. Calatoria did seem interested in those books. We’ll have to see what happens to them. One thing, though,” he says, looking away across the strait toward the Sorrentine peninsula. “Whoever planned his arrival at the villa, it’s kind of sad.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“If the shipwreck was intentional, it means Phineas’s crew were sacrificed on purpose.”

The walk leaves me more exhausted than I’d counted on. When we get back to the villa, I take a short swim in the pool in the lower courtyard and then go back to my room for a nap. I only mean to sleep an hour, but when I wake up I see by a small majolica clock on the dresser that I’ve slept for two. I shower, put on the one dress I brought with me—a Mexican sundress I bought last year in San Antonio—and go out into the courtyard. In honor of my first post-rehab evening appearance, John Lyros has decided to have cocktails in the courtyard and dinner served on the peristylium overlooking the bay. A buffet has been set up along the back wall and heaped with trays of oysters and other fresh seafood. Candles in seashells rim the edge of the fountain and oil lamps hang in between the columns, illuminating the wall painting Simon has been working on. It’s these half-finished figures that have drawn the attention of the party. The artist is in the middle of the group, flanked by Maria and Agnes, apparently enjoying pointing out each lascivious detail to the women, while George stands to one side helping himself to the oysters.

“You’ve made it look like some depraved party,” Maria complains as I approach the group. “This innocent young girl looks almost as if she were enjoying what is happening to her. I’m sure that is not how it looks in the original.”

“I’ve studied the original,” Agnes says. “And that is
exactly
how she looks…not that she’s enjoying herself, I mean…” Agnes stumbles, looking flustered, “but there’s this otherworldly look in her eyes…like she’s gone beyond the experience….”

“The look you’re talking about is the result of the opium her masters would have given her. After all, she was a slave being forced to participate—”

“But not all initiates were slaves. What about the paintings at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii? Scholars think she was the daughter of the household and the paintings are celebrating her marriage.”

“Brava,” Simon rewards Agnes with a smile, “I can see you’ve studied the genre carefully. Didn’t I see you the other day at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii looking at the frescoes there—”

“What do you think, Dr. Chase?” George Petherbridge hands me a glass of chilled white wine as I enter the group. Agnes is blushing. I have the feeling George is trying to break up Agnes and Maria, and again I wonder what it is about Maria, aside from her general rudeness, that’s pushing Agnes’s buttons. “Do you think the girl chosen to play the role of the maiden in these rites was scared or honored?” George asks me.

“It wouldn’t have mattered much,” I answer. “Apparently, Iusta lost her court case and became Calatoria’s slave, so she had no choice either way. I doubt, though, that she saw it as an honor.”

“But you forget that she had been brought up in the house ‘like a daughter.’ Perhaps she was raised to consider it an honor to take part in the rites of the household,” a male voice from behind me says. I turn and see that it’s Elgin, in white slacks and a blue-and-white-striped tunic. The sun has turned his normally blond hair red at the tips, making him look even more devilish than usual. He holds up his glass of wine to me. “Sophie, so glad to see you’ve recovered. You gave me quite a scare.”

My face goes hot remembering all I had told him in my delirium, and wondering what else I might have said that I don’t remember. I raise my wineglass to my lips to give me a moment to think. The wine is deliciously cool with a hint of sulfur—a local wine, then, from grapes grown in volcanic soil.

“Thanks to you, Elgin,” I say. “It’s a good thing you came looking for me. Did you have a good time in Sorrento?”

“Ah, Sorrento.” Simon Bowles nearly sings the word. “I adore the Hotel Excelsior Vittoria. One can still imagine Oscar Wilde trading quips in the salon and Caruso singing under the lemon trees. I myself spied Luciano Pavarotti there when I was staying with friends a few summers ago. Who were you staying with?”

“No one you’d know.” Elgin turns to the buffet table to sample a piece of fried calamari. “An old acquaintance who has a house there. I stopped in Herculaneum this morning on the way back to see the villa. After reading the section of Phineas that Agnes was kind enough to send me last night”—he salutes Agnes with a fried sardine—“I wanted to have another look at the actual paintings.” Elgin moves toward the figure of the girl held down by the two sirens and peers at her face. The figures of the sirens are merely outlines, as is the figure of the god who approaches her, but the face of the supine girl and the face of the siren who holds the whip above her have been painted in. Following Elgin’s gaze back and forth between the two faces I see what Phineas saw his first night at the villa: the faces are identical.

“Bravo!” Elgin says, turning to Simon. “You’ve captured it. They’re the same girl: one horrified at her part in the ritual, one reveling in it. What a brilliant way to suggest the dual nature of pain and pleasure. The dual nature of the feminine, one might say, where pleasure and pain—sex and childbirth—are so irrevocably entwined. So you see, ladies,” he turns to Maria and Agnes, “you’re both right. The girl Iusta was both honored and horrified to play her role in the rite.”

Neither Agnes nor Maria seems to be paying attention to what Elgin is saying, though. Simon is whispering something into Agnes’s ear that is making her blush even more. Maria watches them with a prim, disapproving look. It must be hard, I think, to be the representative of the Church. I imagine she feels like a Christian martyr thrown to the lions.

Elgin looks none too pleased that his efforts to play peacemaker have failed. In fact, he’s glaring at Simon and Agnes—jealous, I imagine, that the older man is flirting with Agnes. He drains his glass of wine in one swallow and then gestures toward the terrace. “And speaking of honors, I believe our generous host has prepared a lavish feast to celebrate Dr. Chase’s recovery. May I have the honor of escorting you in to dinner, Sophie?” He holds out his arm to me and there’s no way I can refuse it without seeming petty—and without Elgin thinking I’m avoiding him because of our past. And besides, I do owe him thanks for rescuing me from the Hotel Convento. As I take his arm I glimpse a smile from Agnes, who’s disengaged herself from Simon, and a frown from Maria. Another example, I wonder, of the dual nature of woman?

As Elgin leads me from the courtyard out onto the terrace, I glance back to the painting on the wall. The problem with Elgin’s analysis, though, is that the girl Iusta could only play one role at a time. I can’t help but wonder which one she played with Phineas.

I
t is that time of evening when the sky shifts from indigo to violet. In sympathy, the sea has darkened to purple—a color that could earn the Homeric epithet “wine-dark.” Lights are just beginning to come on around the shoreline, like beads being strung, one by one, on a curved diadem crowning the amethyst brow of the bay.

John Lyros is leaning against a column looking out at the view. He turns and I’m startled again by his eyes, which have absorbed all the purples in the landscape. They seem to darken for a moment when they fall on my arm linked to Elgin’s, but then he smiles broadly and opens his arms wide, welcoming us all to dinner but also, it seems to me, welcoming us all into the capacious embrace of the bay. Sinus Cumanus, the Romans called it. The Sibyl’s Bay. But
sinus
also means bosom or lap and tonight it feels like this landscape is a living being, a siren luring us with her beauty.

John moves to the head of the table set up lengthwise along the balustrade and holds out the chair to his right. “Dr. Chase must have a seat with a view for her first night dining al fresco,” he says.

Maria, who had been heading for that seat, shrugs her bare shoulders. “
Va bene.
I’ve seen the view a million times. I don’t mind sitting with my back to it.” She skirts around Lyros and takes the seat on his left.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of looking at this view,” Agnes says, sitting one seat away from me—leaving Elgin to take the place between us. Simon Bowles takes the chair at the end of the table, opposite Lyros, shaking out his napkin with a flourish, and George Petherbridge sits down next to him leaving an empty seat between him and Maria, positioning himself directly across from Agnes.

“Is someone else coming?” Maria asks, eyeing the empty chair as though it were an open sore.

“No,” Lyros says, his brow creasing with annoyance, “they’ve gotten the number wrong.” He rings a bell and the housekeeper, without coral necklace, I note, appears and scowls at the empty seat and then at each one of us as if clearly we must have murdered one of our own in order to explain the discrepancy between the number of people and chairs. Then she does something truly odd; she shouts her own name: Guilia. Just when I’m beginning to wonder if the housekeeper’s alternating moods can be explained by a split personality, Guilia’s duplicate appears. As she clears the extra place setting, I notice that she’s wearing the coral beads and when she catches me staring at her she smiles.

“Twins!” I say when both women are gone. “I thought they were the same person, only sometimes she smiled and sometimes she didn’t.”

John Lyros laughs. “Guilia’s the one who smiles and Theresa is the one who doesn’t. You see, one lost her fiancé in a diving accident—”

“The one who doesn’t smile?”

“No, Guilia, the one who smiles, is the one who lost her fiancé. Theresa never had a fiancé. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” Simon Bowles quotes, tilting his wineglass toward Agnes. “Eh, Miss Hancock? I’m sure you’ve left a trail of broken hearts back in Texas.”

“You think Theresa is jealous that she never even had a fiancé?” Agnes asks, pointedly ignoring Simon’s remark and looking around the table.

George nods eagerly. “Maybe she was secretly in love with Giulia’s fiancé….”

“Maybe she killed the fiancé….” Elgin suggests.

Maria tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Perhaps Theresa is bad-tempered because she works harder. She’s always cleaning up after Guila’s mistakes—like missetting the table tonight.”

I’m about to ask how she knows who set the table when John laughs. “Well, I only hope that you all train your keen investigative eyes on the behavior of Phineas, Calatoria, and Iusta with the same fervor. You’ve all had time to read the first installment by now. What do you make of it?”

A silence descends over the table while Guilia and Theresa serve the Caprese salads. I imagine we’re all trying to think of something insightful to say, or that we’re embarrassed by Iusta’s nighttime visit to Phineas’s room, or maybe we’re all just enjoying our tomatoes, which seem to glow an even deeper red than usual in the purplish evening light.

Agnes breaks the silence. “Well, I think it was awful that Calatoria sent Iusta as a present to Phineas…as if she were nothing but a…a…”

“Piece of property?” Maria suggests. “That’s what she was to her, after all. You weren’t shocked that the girl would participate in a sexual rite, why are you so shocked that she was offered to the guests? At least she probably was tipped by the guests.”

“You make her sound like a prostitute!” Agnes exclaims, her voice shaking. “Did you notice she was only seventeen years old!”

“Seventeen would have been considered mature in Roman times,” Simon says, tearing off a hunk of bread from a loaf and using it to sop up the olive oil left on his plate. “We can’t judge the ancients by our own mores. And you needn’t turn it into a feminist thing. Calatoria could just as easily have sent Phineas a young male slave.”

“You must have been disappointed that she hadn’t,” Maria says, smiling, but in John’s direction, not Simon’s.

I look nervously toward the painter wondering how he’ll react, but he only smiles and licks the olive oil off his fingers. “And you, Maria, must have been disappointed that Iusta wasn’t really carrying a whip.”

“I know I was,” Elgin says, winking at me.

“So clearly it’s the sex part that everybody’s interested in,” Lyros interrupts.

There’s an embarrassed silence while Guilia clears our salad plates and Theresa serves the pasta course—a thin spaghetti prepared with the delicious anchovy and eggplant sauce that I had for lunch yesterday.

“You know,” I say, “I think this sauce is probably a lot like the Roman
garum
that Phineas says he ate his first night here—I mean his first night at the Villa della Notte.”

John laughs. “There you go: a Phineas observation that’s not about sex. Brava, Sophie! Sophie and I were also discussing today the location of Phineas’s bedroom. She noticed from his view of the wall painting that Phineas must have occupied the same room, or rather the corresponding room, as hers.”

“Yes, I noticed that, too,” George says. “Interesting that he was given a room off the main courtyard instead of on the lower levels where the rest of the household would have slept.”

“It was probably cooler on the top level,” Maria observes. “I’m sure Dr. Chase’s room, for instance, is much cooler than ours are.”

“Or maybe,” Simon says, ignoring Maria’s obvious resentment of the room allocations in the present, “Calatoria didn’t want Phineas to see what was happening on the lower levels.”

“Yes, they were probably getting ready for the rites.” Elgin picks up a long skinny baguette and waves it in the air. “There would have been lots of naked slave girls running around in the halls.”

“Well,” Lyros says, “whatever reason Calatoria had for assigning her guest a room on the top level, it has important repercussions for us.”

“What’s that?” Elgin asks, breaking the baguette in half.

“The scroll we possess, that we’re now reading from, was found in the middle of the courtyard, as though it had been dropped by someone fleeing the villa during the eruption. We haven’t known where to look for the rest of Phineas’s scrolls. Assuming that he didn’t leave the villa before the eruption, we now know where Phineas’s trunk should be—a trunk that apparently contained scrolls Phineas bought in Greece and Egypt—”

“Bought?”
Maria scoffs. “It sounds like he
bribed
temple slaves or priests to steal them!”

“Well, however he came by them, they must have been pretty valuable for him to secure them in a wax-lined trunk and then worry about saving them in the middle of a storm,” Lyros replies. “I, for one, would dearly love to know what Phineas Aulus thought was so valuable. Tomorrow I’m going to direct the excavation crew to tunnel into the bedroom off the courtyard. I’m curious to see what Phineas had in his waterproofed trunk.”

“I’m curious to find out what was on the lower levels that Calatoria didn’t want Phineas to see,” Simon says. “Perhaps there are more paintings.”

“Do you think,” Agnes asks, accepting another glass of the deceptively mild Caprese wine from George, “that the mystery ritual actually included everything that’s in that painting? I mean, the sex and whipping and all?”

“Oh, I certainly hope so,” Simon says. “This setting just screams out for a little old-fashioned S and M. You should read what the foreigners got up to on this very island.”

“I don’t think that’s what Miss Hancock was talking about,” Lyros says, glaring at Simon.

“Oh, but I’m sure Miss Hancock would find it interesting to know that the practices of the ancients she studies are not dead and gone.”

“You mean like cults and sacrifices?” Agnes asks, her cheeks pinking in the glow of the sunset.

“Exactly!” Simon crows, ignoring the increasingly angry glare of his host. It almost seems as if Simon is deliberately trying to tease Lyros. “You see, my dear, Capri has drawn to it many who sought to reexperience the golden age of antiquity—Axel Munthe, Norman Douglas, Friedrich Krupp…but Baron Fersen is my favorite. He came to the island at the turn of the century with his lover, Nino Cesarini, the son of a Roman newspaper vendor.”

“Wasn’t the boy only fourteen?” Maria asks.

“Fifteen,” Simon replies. “And believe me, I’m sure he was happy to trade his working-class life in Rome for the pleasure palace Fersen built for them.”

“The Villa Lysis?” I ask, remembering that this was the story which Lyros hadn’t wanted to tell me on the walk up to Tiberius’s villa.

“Yes, named for the boy to whom Plato explained friendship. Fersen had the villa built just below Tiberius’s villa because he had the idea of re-creating the atmosphere of the emperor’s sojourn on Capri.”

“An odd role model,” Agnes points out. “Wasn’t Tiberius known for tossing people off cliffs? And didn’t you tell me, Professor Lawrence, when you took me to the Blue Grotto, that there were rumors that he molested boys there?”

“Rumors,” Simon Bowles answers before Elgin, who looks embarrassed at Agnes’s mentioning of their excursion to the Blue Grotto, can. “But the part about the boys being sacrificed, well, Fersen
did
find that romantic. In fact, he heard a story about a favorite of Tiberius, a boy named Hypatus, whom Tiberius sacrificed to the sun god Mithras—”

“There’s a gravestone at the Naples Museum with an inscription describing the sacrifice,” Elgin adds.

“Yes, that’s how Fersen first heard about it. Somehow he conceived the idea that if Nino were truly faithful to him he’d be willing to sacrifice himself. Or perhaps the boy himself suggested the rite as a proof of his devotion.”

“This baron sacrificed a young boy here?” Agnes asks, looking suddenly pale. Lyros’s instincts were right, I think; this is no story for a girl who’s so recently witnessed another sort of blood sacrifice.

“No, no, no! It was only meant to be a
symbolic
sacrifice. A bit of harmless dress-up, really. Fersen was decked out as the Emperor Tiberius and Nino as the boy Hypatus—although I imagine that his outfit was rather scanty—and all their friends were dressed in Roman costumes as well. After a night of opium smoking, they paraded down to the Grotto Matermania, which Fersen believed was the site of an ancient Mithras cult. They lit incense and sang hymns and then at sunrise Fersen, brandishing a fruit knife”—Simon lifts his own arm, wielding a butter knife—“delivered the tiniest, symbolic cut.” He demonstrates by piercing one of the ripe plums that have been laid out for dessert.

“Was the blood symbolic, too?” Maria asks drily. “Or did he bleed real blood?”

“Oh, I imagine there was a little blood,” Simon says, biting into the punctured plum, “but nothing more than what would occur while two schoolmates became ‘blood brothers.’ Unfortunately, a local girl spied on the whole thing and ran to tell the village—no doubt exaggerating what she saw. Rumors flew about the island, as they are wont to do, and before long the incident, referred to as ‘the deed in the grotto,’ had acquired so much prurient embroidery that Fersen and Nino had to flee the island—and all for a bit of playacting no more sinister than what you Americans get up to at your universities in your fraternities and sororities.”

“We never sacrificed anyone at Tri Delt,” Agnes exclaims. “Not even in fun! And we certainly never smoked any opium.”

“You’re saying your American fraternity brothers never wear togas or ingest illegal substances?” Simon asks.

“Well, maybe the boys over in Sigma Alpha Epsilon. There was that horrible hazing incident last year,” Agnes admits.

“There you go.” Simon slaps his hand against the table so hard that he upsets the demitasse that Guilia has just put in front of him. “We’re all hungry for ritual, to experience something beyond the banality of everyday life, to stand outside of ourselves—isn’t that what you saw in the initiate’s face, Miss Hancock?—to experience, literally,
ecstasy.
That’s what all these crazies that you read about in your American newspapers are looking for. Come now, your own native Texas has been full of such incidents—that chap Whitman who shot all those people from some tower, those deluded children in Waco, and just recently—”